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Monday 28 September

Systems and Control

Benefits of Dynamic Thermal Rating for Distribution Transformers Under Accelerated Load Growth

Dynamic Thermal Rating (DTR) has been widely applied to transmission lines for congestion management, but its potential for distribution transformers is less explored. By adjusting equipment ratings based on real ambient and operating conditions, DTR allows transformers to operate above conservative static nameplate values without compromising asset health. This paper evaluates how DTR can serve as a non-wires alternative to traditional upgrades in distribution systems facing accelerated load growth. Using an example feeder from the SMART-DS dataset, we compare conventional transformer replacement strategies against DTR-enabled operation with ambient-adjusted ratings. The results demonstrate that DTR can defer a significant number of transformer upgrades and reduce annual upgrade costs. More broadly, DTR is most effective in regions with pronounced weather diversity, peak demand occurring during cooler periods, or sustained load growth that would otherwise trigger costly reinforcements. These findings show that DTR is a practical and cost-effective option for utilities, provides both operational flexibility and investment deferral opportunities, and offers a foundation for developing distribution-level DTR programs.
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All authors Wenbo Wang, Killian McKenna, Francisco de Leon, Haowei Lu, Xin Fang

Machine Learning

BASE: Batch-Aware Selection of Experts Using Predicted Removal Error for Efficient MoE Decoding

Large language models are increasingly expensive to serve. In large-scale serving systems, autoregressive decoding is often bottlenecked by transferring model weights from accelerator high-bandwidth memory into on-chip SRAM. Mixture-of-experts (MoE) models reduce computation by activating only a small subset of experts per token, but this sparsity does not translate directly to batched decoding. Different requests select different experts; therefore, the combined active set across many concurrent requests can span a substantial fraction of the expert pool and require significantly more expert weights to be transferred. Most expert-reduction techniques make retention decisions independently for each token and therefore do not address this batch-level expansion. More recently, batch-aware methods have attempted to coordinate expert use across concurrent requests and reuse experts already fetched for the batch. Yet their selection criteria are based primarily on router rankings or expert statistics collected during calibration. Consequently, these criteria are not directly tied to the output error caused by dropping an expert, nor do they capture how an expert's contribution changes across tokens at inference time. We instead rank experts according to how much their removal would change the MoE-layer output. To apply this criterion during serving, we train a lightweight linear predictor during calibration that estimates the expert removal cost for each incoming token, and develop custom GPU kernels for cost prediction and expert selection. Across three MoE architectures, BASE improves the quality-efficiency tradeoff without retraining. On Qwen3-30B-A3B, it improves average accuracy by 29.5 points over the strongest baseline at comparable throughput under a tight expert budget. At a higher expert budget, it is 60% faster than dense inference while remaining within 0.4 accuracy points.
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Machine Learning

How Language Models Differ in Redistributing Attention-Head Activity Under Serial Demand

The way a model distributes activity over each layer's attention heads offers a coarse view of how it routes information through depth; how this changes with the task is part of what a mechanistic account must explain. Holding prompt length fixed, we vary how many serial steps a task demands and measure, in every layer of 17 open-weight models, whether activity concentrates on a few heads or spreads across many as demand rises. Both occur: in most models, layers just before mid-depth concentrate activity and later layers spread it. Models differ in where and how strongly this happens. The Qwen2.5 base models from 0.5B to 7B, for example, spread less than the average model in every task and concentrate activity in parts of their second half, where Llama models from 1B to 8B and OLMo-2 spread; the contrast largely holds between Llama-3.1-70B and Qwen2.5-72B, which have the same number of layers and heads. These differences are reproducible, and post-trained models keep much of their base model's pattern. An ablation study suggests that, within a task, models whose activity is more concentrated on their top heads also depend more on those heads for the answer. Concentration and spreading across layers thus offer a new way to compare models, by how they route information through depth. Code is available at https://github.com/johnnyjli/serial-demand-heads.
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All authors Johnny Jingze Li, Abdulla Kuleib, Kalyan Basu, Gabriel A. Silva

Combinatorics

Hadwiger–Nelson Problem for Typical Norms

The classical Hadwiger-Nelson problem asks for the chromatic number of the unit distance graph of the Euclidean plane. Over the years, this problem has been considered for a variety of other normed spaces, with higher-dimensional Euclidean space $\mathbb{R}^d$ being perhaps the most natural and well-studied. Alon, Bucić, and Sauermann proved that, for a typical norm on $\mathbb{R}^d$, the chromatic number of the unit distance graph is at most $2^d$. We improve this exponential bound to a linear one by showing that the chromatic number of a typical norm on $\mathbb{R}^d$ is at most $2d$ and that this is tight. This shows a stark difference in the behavior compared to the Euclidean case, where there is an exponential lower bound. One of the key ingredients is a certain high-dimensional, matrix generalization of the Lonely runner conjecture, which also allows us to completely settle the so-called view-obstruction conjecture of Schoenberg from 1978 and a more recent covering-radius conjecture of Henze and Malikiosis.
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Computer Vision

LeRF: Learning Reference Coordinate Frames for Perspective Taking Reasoning

Perspective taking is a fundamental component of spatial intelligence, requiring models interpret spatial relations from a specified viewpoint, such as that of another entity or an imagined observer. Despite the increasing spatial reasoning capabilities of Vision-Language Models (VLMs), they still struggle with perspective taking, often defaulting to the camera viewpoint when a query requires reasoning from a different perspective. We introduce Learning Reference Coordinate Frames for Perspective Taking (LeRF), a framework that trains VLMs to construct and use explicit reference frames for viewpoint-dependent reasoning. Given an image and a query, LeRF decides whether a coordinate frame is necessary. If so, it grounds the reference entity and predicts the frame's origin and entity-centered reference frame. A lightweight renderer overlays the frame onto the image, enabling subsequent reasoning over these visual cues without external perception models or explicit 3D reconstruction. To learn this process, we first perform supervised fine-tuning to teach selective tool invocation and reference coordinate frame prediction, followed by reinforcement learning on spatial VQA pairs to improve frame-guided reasoning. Across diverse perspective-taking benchmarks, LeRF consistently improves over its backbone and achieves strong performance against existing open-source methods. Further evaluations also show improved reference-frame grounding and orientation estimation, supporting the effectiveness of learned reference frames for viewpoint-dependent reasoning.
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All authors Bang Xiao, Wenqi Jia, Ozgur Kara, Tiancheng Shen, Yibo Yang, Bolin Lai, Junho Kim, James Matthew Rehg

Computation and Language

CineSubBench: Evaluating LLMs on Long-Form Narrative and Cultural Understanding from Multilingual Movie Subtitles

Large language models are increasingly evaluated in specialized domains such as law, medicine, software engineering, and cybersecurity, yet film remains comparatively underexplored despite requiring long-form narrative integration, multilingual interpretation, and culturally situated audience judgments. We introduce CineSubBench, a benchmark for evaluating long-context film understanding from multilingual movie subtitles. A subtitle track represents a film as thousands of short, temporally ordered utterances from which models must reconstruct characters, relationships, events, causal progression, and themes without explicit scene or event structure. CineSubBench contains 1,012 films with complete subtitle coverage in six languages, yielding 6,072 tracks and 8.13M timestamped subtitle entries. It provides a matched multi-task, multilingual, and multicultural (MultiX) evaluation setting: seven tasks span narrative reconstruction and abstraction, genre prediction, age suitability, country-specific motion-picture ratings across ten national classification systems, and subtitle-grounded language safety. Across nine LLMs, plot premises are recovered more reliably than event-complete synopses; cross-lingual consistency varies substantially across models and languages; national rating systems expose distinct calibration patterns; and strong profanity is far easier to ground than mild obscenity. CineSubBench establishes film as a long-context LLM evaluation domain and provides a unified benchmark for measuring narrative, multilingual, cultural, and evidence-grounding capabilities.
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Computer Vision

Sparse-View Interpretable 3D Animal Behavior Representations for Neural Encoding and Decoding

A deeper understanding of brain function requires a precise, structured characterization of behavior. Yet, extracting behavioral representations from video in a form suitable for scientific analysis remains a fundamental challenge. Many prior studies represent behavior via pose estimation or nonlinear video embeddings. However, pose tracking discards rich information beyond predefined keypoints, while nonlinear video embeddings lack interpretability. We address this limitation with SABLE (Sparse-view Animal Behavior Latent Embeddings), a self-supervised framework that leverages a geometric inductive bias to learn behavior representations. By augmenting a multi-view transformer with priors from monocular depth and pose estimation, SABLE reconstructs 3D animal behavior from extremely sparse views while learning explicit 3D latent structure. Without ground-truth 3D labels, it reliably recovers 3D behavior from two-view videos, whereas state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods fail or yield degenerate solutions. Across the International Brain Lab and Cheese3D datasets, we demonstrate that SABLE learns 3D representations that match or exceed prior SOTA performance in neural encoding and decoding. Once pretrained across animals, SABLE serves as an off-the-shelf model that generalizes zero-shot to unseen animals without animal-specific calibration or retraining. Our method establishes 3D-aware video embeddings that capture complex behavior, opening new avenues for studying brain-behavior relationships.
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All authors Xinming Dai, Qihang Jin, Tianshu Tan, Baiyuan Chen, Hanrui Lyu, Lenny Aharon, Kyle Daruwalla, Xun Helen Hou, Matthew R. Whiteway, Liam Paninski, Yizi Zhang

Machine Learning

Preconditioned Physics-Informed Neural Operator Training

Neural operators are typically trained in a supervised fashion, which requires a dataset to be generated with a classical solver. Training them physics-informed, i.e., purely from the governing equations, removes this large offline cost and allows fresh samples to be drawn at every optimization step, but has so far been limited to simplified problems and trails supervised training in accuracy. The obstacle is the ill-conditioning of physics-informed losses, which differential operators induce and which worsens as the discretization is refined. We therefore propose a preconditioned residual loss function and show mesh-independent conditioning for elliptic problems and greatly improved conditioning for saddle point problems. Realized through geometric and algebraic multigrid, the construction applies to linear and nonlinear equations, steady or time-dependent, on structured and unstructured meshes, is agnostic to the neural operator architecture, and adds no cost at inference. On the Poisson, Allen-Cahn and stationary Stokes equations, the resulting label-free training matches supervised training and is four to twenty-five times more accurate than previous physics-informed operator learning methods.
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Machine Learning

EnergyEminence: Source-Aware Environmental Calibration and Evaluation in a Physics-Grounded Grid Digital Twin

Power-grid digital twins must combine data-driven prediction with physically meaningful state evolution while preserving the provenance of environmental observations. This paper presents an early-stage EnergyEminence testbed that couples an IEEE 118-bus-style graph-temporal predictor, nonlinear AC cascade simulation, and operator-dashboard-like temporal replay. In addition, we introduce a shared bounded calibration that converts wildfire-detection confidence and spatial extent into source-comparable wildfire interpretable and explainable evidence. We then evaluate it with visually diverse fire and hard-negative videos. Sixteen synthetic environmental videos are curated to generate 160 source-tracked grid scenarios, and a source-video-disjoint test yields 10 true positives, 8 false positives, 22 true negatives, and no false negatives. The errors occur in stressed, non-cascading scenarios conditioned on an unseen growing-fire source. Our diagnostic then reveals environmental shortcut learning that is obscured by scenario-level random splitting. The paper therefore contributes a data-centric and inspectable evaluation workflow for multimodal grid-resilience models, together with evidence supporting separation of environmental alerting from electrical cascade inference
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Computation and Language

Lost in Translation: Measuring the Effect of Non-Native English on End User Performance of Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used by people whose first language is not English, yet these users have been shown to receive systematically lower-quality responses than fluent speakers. Which specific features of non-native English drive this gap remains unclear, because fluency is itself a composite of mechanical accuracy, vocabulary use, organization, and discourse coherence. Here, we introduce FABLE, a controlled dataset of 190,911 English prompt variants derived from 174K real user prompts for writing-related tasks. Evaluating responses from 34 open-weight LLMs, we find a clear asymmetry; while models do not propagate surface errors such as misspellings into their outputs, models do mirror higher-level rhetorical and lexical qualities present in the user's prompt. Further, the overall quality of responses differs substantially between the least- and most-fluent prompts. These results highlight a key LLM performance disparity for non-native English LLM users, resulting in both lower-quality and less-fluent answers.
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Quantum Physics

Bivariate Bicycle Codes over Group Algebras

We study a weighted-shift formulation of bivariate bicycle group-algebra (BBGA) codes over finite group algebras. One binary shift acts by right multiplication and the other by left multiplication; associativity ensures that these shifts commute even for a nonabelian seed group. Bivariate polynomials in the shifts, including mixed monomials, therefore define CSS codes. We give explicit sparsity bounds and distinguish nonabelian seed groups from codes that are intrinsically inequivalent to abelian realizations. For $D_3$, a pair of weighted permutation shifts generates a regular $C_6\times C_{12}$ action and recovers the known $[[144,12,12]]$ and $[[144,14,14]]$ bivariate bicycle codes. We also present a computer-verified $[[144,16,12]]$ code over $A_4\times C_6$, with every check of weight eight. This example belongs to the established nonabelian two-block group-algebra family. Exhaustive low-weight enumeration and an intrinsic stabilizer-support invariant certify that it is inequivalent to any ordinary abelian BB or two-block group-algebra realization, even under qubit permutations combined with local Clifford operations. Finally, a nonuniform weighted-shift construction over $\mathbb{F}_2[C_3]$ yields a $[[18,4,3]]$ code with check weights six and eight. An exact enumeration of its minimum stabilizer supports rules out every ordinary binary 2BGA realization at that length, under the same equivalence. This establishes that the unrestricted weighted-shift formulation extends beyond the ordinary 2BGA class, even with an abelian seed group.
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Optimization and Control

Inverse Optimal Feedback Stabilization of 3D Nonholonomic Vehicles in Spherical Coordinates

Inverse optimal control provides optimality and robustness guarantees without solving the Hamilton–Jacobi–Bellman (HJB) equation, but its application to 3D nonholonomic vehicles has been precluded by the absence of strict control Lyapunov functions (CLFs). Recently, such strict CLFs were constructed for the 3D nonholonomic vehicle in spherical coordinates, which circumvent Brockett's obstruction, on the largest possible domain. Building on this construction, this paper develops a general inverse optimal stabilizing controller for the 3D nonholonomic vehicle actuated by surge velocity, pitch rate, and yaw rate. The design is a damping $L_gV$ feedback that minimizes a meaningful cost and inherits stability margins. Its flexibility is demonstrated through two choices of penalty function: a quadratic running cost on the state, recovering a near-classical optimal control formulation, and stabilization under user-defined input constraints. Numerical simulations illustrate stabilization performance, control-effort tradeoffs, and the effect of input constraints.
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General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology

Zero expansion is not free: the sharp minimum of Eulerian negative energy in Natário warp drives

Natário's warp drive replaces the contraction and expansion of the Alcubierre bubble by a divergence-free shift. We determine exactly how much Eulerian negative energy this construction requires. For the Lobo-Visser volume integral $\mathcal{E}_{\rm LV}=-\int_{\Sigma_t}\rho_{\rm E}\,d^3x$ on the standard flat slice, with unit lapse, a flat interior of radius $R$, and exact matching to a uniform exterior stream of speed $v$ at $R+\Delta$, we prove a lower bound for every admissible shift and find the exact minimum in closed form at every aspect ratio. As the wall thins, $\mathcal{E}_{\min}\sim v^2R^4/(4\Delta^3)$ with sharp constant $1/4$, two powers of $R/\Delta$ above the earlier estimate $v^2R^2/\Delta$ applied to both Natário and Alcubierre bubbles. Incompressibility forces the flux displaced by the bubble to return through the wall, and the tangential shear of this return current dominates the energy. The full variational problem is equivalent to classical Stokes flow between concentric spheres. Its unique minimizer tends to a minimal-curvature cubic in the thin-wall limit. An exact flux identity and independent quadrature support the analytic result. The bounded quantity is slice and observer dependent and is distinct from the ADM mass.
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Machine Learning

On the spectral properties of generative denoiser Jacobians

Generative denoising models, such as diffusion and flow-matching, learn to sample from complex distributions by training a deep neural network denoiser to recover clean data from noise-corrupted samples. While such models are typically compared on the quality of their synthesized samples, these metrics provide limited insight into how the underlying denoiser, which drives generation, differs. In this work, we propose to analyze the spectrum of the denoiser Jacobian as a tool to characterize these differences. Across pre-trained denoising models, we observe that better generative performance is associated with larger Jacobian eigenvalues. Motivated by this, we introduce a regularization scheme that controls the Jacobian spectrum by training the denoiser on perturbed inputs, with perturbations suppressing or amplifying Jacobian responses. On ImageNet, we test whether directly modifying the Jacobian spectral properties leads to improved generations. Our findings suggest that denoisers benefit from both strengthening responses along data-relevant principal eigen-directions and suppressing the noisy, data-irrelevant ones. This establishes the denoiser Jacobian as a useful tool for identifying differences between generative denoising models.
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Computation and Language

The Canonical Order Problem: When Large Language Models Are Unreliable Knowledge Bases for Multi-Valued Relations

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as knowledge bases (KBs) due to the vast amount of knowledge they acquire during pre-training. While many works focus on extracting single relational triples, most real-world relations are multi-valued and require generating sets of entities. In this paper, we investigate how LLMs represent and generate multi-valued relations. We identify the canonical order problem: The probabilistic distributions inside LLMs organize many multi-valued relations according to a canonical ordering (e.g., alphabetical or chronological). Through mechanistic analysis, we show that set generation in LLMs can be thought of in terms of three phases: (1) retrieval of candidate entities, (2) internal sorting, and (3) selection of the next element. As a result, prompts aiming to construct KBs that deviate from this internal canonical ordering lead to a markedly reduced reliability of LLMs when aiming to generate complete sets for multi-valued relations.
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All authors Timo Pierre Schrader, Annemarie Friedrich, Simon Razniewski, Lukas Lange

Machine Learning

Representable but Unlearned: Encoding Rank and the Interaction-Prediction Floor

Input encodings can restrict which measured contrasts a predictor can jointly reproduce, even when no single contrast is forced to vanish. We compute the attainable contrast space from an encoder's equivalence classes and a fixed contrast design, without labels, loss, or a fitted model; projecting the recorded contrasts onto that space gives an empirical error floor for any unrestricted decoder on those classes. On a 140-rectangle siRNA interaction panel, a graph neural network's training-only feature mask merges 165 endpoint states into 90 classes and cuts the rank of the 140 interaction contrasts to 72. The resulting floor is 0.009980, which is 14.6% of the fitted model's interaction squared error; the fitted model reaches 0.068335, slightly worse than a control predicting no interaction at all. A minimum of three restored chemistry columns recovers full rank. Refitting without the mask removes the floor entirely, yet interaction MSE improves by only 0.000017 under the reported protocol, and the restored columns remain absent from every training input. On a released RNA-splicing predictor, whose encoding is injective on the measured states, the same computation returns the full design rank of 1,986 and a floor of exactly zero. These results separate what an encoding permits from what a fitted model achieves; they do not identify what limits the remaining error. The rank check needs no fits and bounds what any amount of training under a fixed encoding can recover. The project repository is available at https://github.com/shadi97kh/REPRESENTABLE-BUT-UNLEARNED.
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History and Philosophy of Physics

What is Physics For? Why Classical Physics is not the Limit of Quantum Mechanics

Quantum mechanics is justifiably held to be the most successful physical theory ever created; yet no universally accepted interpretation of its mathematical formalism exists after a century of debate. We examine the specific claim that classical physics stands as the low-action limit of quantum mechanics, arguing that the deep interpretive difficulties exposed by the quantum formalism, the measurement problem, the subject-object divide, and the nature of scientific representation, were already latent in classical physics, constituting what we call a blind spot of objectivity. Taking quantum theory as an invitation to re-examine the implicit metaphysical commitments bundled with 'classical physics', we explore two key issues-the objective/subjective split and the nature of theoretical representation-and argue that quantum mechanics does not represent a break with classical physics per se but rather brings previously unacknowledged philosophical assumptions into the limelight. We discuss the London-Bauer interpretation and QBism as exemplars of interpretations that embrace this broader reconceptualisation.
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All authors Adam Frank, Jacques L. Pienaar, Michel Bitbol, Harald Wiltsche, Gabriela Barreto Lemos, Marcelo Gleiser, Marcus Appleby

Earth and Planetary Astrophysics

Cool, Cloudy Nights on an Ultrahot Neptune: A Panchromatic NIRISS/NIRSpec Transmission Spectrum of LTT 9779 b

Studies of planets that reside in the hot Neptune desert allow us to gain insight into how their atmospheres survive the intense flux from their host stars. One such member of that population, LTT 9779 b, is unique in that it has a confirmed atmosphere across various multi-wavelength studies, although results regarding the planet's atmospheric content differ. We present a panchromatic ($\lambda = 0.63 - 5.165$ $\mu$m) JWST transmission spectrum of LTT 9779 b's atmosphere, including a re-reduction of previously obtained NIRISS/SOSS data and a reduction of recent NIRSpec/G395H data. Through atmospheric retrievals, we find muted spectral features consistent with the presence of clouds and a low terminator temperature ($\sim560 \ \mathrm{K}$ for free chemistry, and $\sim910-950 \ \mathrm{K}$ for equilibrium chemistry), with a range of possible atmospheric metallicity values dependent on atmospheric temperature and cloud coverage. Forward modeling suggests that, if clouds are present, small sub-micron particle sizes, moderate-to-high sedimentation efficiency ($f_{\rm sed} = 1 - 3$, corresponding to a relatively compact vertical cloud extent), low particle column densities, and high eddy diffusion coefficients ($k_{zz} \geq 10^{10}$ cm$^{2}$s$^{-1}$) are preferred. Probing silicate cloud absorption features in the mid-infrared is needed to confirm the cloud species, allowing us to break the cloud-metallicity degeneracy that is present in this panchromatic transmission spectrum.
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All authors Sarah Stamer, Diana Dragomir, Annabella Meech, Joshua D. Lothringer, Reza Ashtari, Jonathan Brande, Vivien Parmentier, Ian J. M. Crossfield, Tansu Daylan, Suman Saha, K. Angelique Kahle, Kevin B. Stevenson, David R. Coria, Jared E.J. Splinter, Nicolas B. Cowan, Emma Esparza-Borges

Computation and Language

Geometric Representations of African Languages: A Regional Semantic Hub and Cultural Steering

We study how Gemma 4 31B represents African languages and responds to cultural steering. The first study compares nine African languages and three controls using probes, contrast directions, and measures of representation similarity. Transfer from English varies across languages and layers. Directions representing an Africa versus West contrast are more aligned among the African languages than between these languages and the controls at several layers. The comparison across language families passes the reported Holm threshold at five of twelve layers, although dependence between language pairs limits the statistical interpretation. Within Nigeria, Yoruba and Igbo are more aligned than the average of their pairs with Hausa at eleven of twelve layers. The second study uses separate English data to construct directions for Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, and South Africa. Under union scoring at the selected strengths, estimated differences in attribution rates from random directions range from 0.63 to 0.81. Most outputs pass the automated structural coherence screen. Comparisons with Aya Expanse 32B show that results depend on the representation measure. Together, the studies document regional and family patterns in the sampled representations and country steering in English.
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Analysis of PDEs

Unique continuation for the periodic Benjamin-Bona-Mahony equation

We prove unique continuation for the real periodic Benjamin–Bona–Mahony equation in the energy space: a solution that equals a constant on a nonempty space–time strip is that constant everywhere. In particular, Rosier's unique continuation conjecture [23] holds without any smallness or mean assumption. It even suffices to observe, at one point $x_0$ and for $t$ in an interval, the solution and the potential $\psi=(1-\partial_x^2)^{-1}(u+u^2/2)$ of its flux: $u(x_0,t)=C$ and $\psi(x_0,t)=C+C^2/2$ imply $u\equiv C$, and the second condition cannot be dropped when $C=-1$. The proof uses an exponentially weighted Hamiltonian of indefinite sign with a coercive dissipation identity, and it applies to every nonconstant real polynomial flux. Consequently, Rosier's stabilization results for two localized feedback laws and for a boundary feedback hold unconditionally, for arbitrary data. Stationary step profiles show that the theorem fails in $H^s$ for $0\leq s<1/2$. We also give a generating-series proof of single-point unique continuation for the linearized equation and discuss related control results.
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Quantum Physics

Near-optimal quantum simulation of lattice Lindbladian dynamics

We consider the problem of simulating dynamics under geometrically local Lindbladians acting on a lattice of qudits. We present an algorithm to approximate the time evolution under these Lindbladians for evolution time $t$ and on $N$ qudits to diamond norm error $\varepsilon$ using geometrically local circuits of depth $O(t \ \polylog(Nt/\varepsilon))$. Our results thus achieve a performance comparable to that of the Haah-Hastings-Kothari-Low (HHKL) algorithm for lattice Hamiltonian simulation.
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Computation and Language

FastGuide: Accelerating Reward Guidance for Diffusion Large Language Models

Gradient-based reward guidance provides a flexible way to use downstream reward models to control masked diffusion language models at inference time. However, its computational cost remains high as each decoding iteration incurs expensive diffusion model forward passes and reward model backpropagation steps. To address this, we introduce FastGuide, an adaptive hybrid of parallel and autoregressive decoding to accelerate reward guidance for diffusion language models. In analogy to parallel decoding, FastGuide amortizes the cost of reward model backpropagation by computing guidance once per decoding step and reusing it to generate multiple tokens. Within each decoding step, FastGuide makes diffusion forward passes autoregressive by unmasking tokens one at a time while efficiently recomputing token distributions after each unmasking by utilizing KV caching techniques and sparse recomputation of attention. Lastly, to adapt hybrid decoding to the model's confidence, FastGuide defers any token that the model is unconfident about under its recomputed distribution. Experiments on three reward benchmarks demonstrate that FastGuide is up to $4.4\times$ faster than sequential reward-guided decoding while retaining similar generation quality.
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Computation and Language

SCOUT: Synergizing Reasoning and Tool-Use for Computer-Use Safety

Computer-use agents (CUAs), while capable of completing computer tasks in everyday and professional workflows, can cause unintended harm even under benign instructions and environments. However, detecting such harm remains challenging. First, it requires careful, task-specific reasoning: verifiers guided only by general safety criteria often overlook many important but subtle harmful behaviors. Second, it requires active investigation: past trajectory screenshots show what the agent did but not always what actually changed in the environment, so LLM-as-a-judge verifiers that rely on screenshots alone may be unable to determine the actual consequences of actions. To address these challenges, we introduce SCOUT, a two-stage agentic safety verifier that synergizes reasoning-intensive rubric generation with tool-intensive evidence gathering. First, our SCOUT rubric generator extensively reasons over the task and the agent's trajectory to determine what successful and safe execution should entail, generating task-specific completion and safety rubrics. Then, our SCOUT probing agent follows these rubrics to interact with the post-execution environment and collect grounded evidence for final safety and completion judgments. We evaluate our framework on two computer-use safety benchmarks. On AutoElicit-Bench, SCOUT achieves 75.4 unsafe F1 and 74.5 completion F1, outperforming LLM-as-a-judge verifiers and naive tool-use verifiers. SCOUT leads on OS-Blind with 76.4% unsafe detection accuracy. Test-time reflection reduces final unsafe execution rates from 30.2% to 17.2% on AutoElicit-Bench. Ablations and analysis show that tool-free rubric generation in SCOUT elicits substantially more reasoning and is crucial for safety detection across verifier backbones, especially non-frontier ones. A preliminary extension to coding tasks shows that SCOUT can support safety verification beyond computer-use.
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All authors Jianxing Chen, Xiao Yu, Shipra Agrawal, Zhou Yu

Number Theory

Weighted mean squares of $\zeta$ and $L(\cdot,\chi_4)$: closed forms, reciprocity, and a missing identity

This short note is a concise yet complete overview, intended for students, researchers, and AIs, bringing together in a unified notation the closed-form and reciprocity identities arising from weighted mean squares of the Riemann zeta function and Dirichlet $L$-functions on the critical line. In addition, we prove a new reciprocity identity: the exponentially weighted counterpart of a formula of Lewis and Zagier for the primitive character of modulus $4$.
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Computer Vision

PreviewDiff: Multimodal Critic-Guided Search over Diffusion Latents

Diffusion models can produce striking images and videos, but they still struggle with the compositional details that make a generation faithful to a prompt, such as object counts, attribute binding, spatial relations, and temporally grounded actions. A common way to improve prompt satisfaction is to spend more compute at test time through Best-of-N sampling, but final-sample selection is fixed. Best-of-N can only choose among completed outputs and cannot repair a promising trajectory before it fails. We introduce PreviewDiff, a training-free test-time search method that turns diffusion sampling from scalar search into a multimodal critic-guided search over intermediate latents. At selected denoising checkpoints, PreviewDiff decodes a partial preview, asks a multimodal judge to score and critique it, and uses the resulting natural-language feedback to branch over semantic prompt edits and locally re-noised latent continuations. These branches are then scored and selectively rolled forward, allowing verifier compute to guide generation while the sample is still editable. Across image and video generation benchmarks, PreviewDiff consistently improves over budget-matched Best-of-N selection and strong scalar-search baselines. Ablations show that earlier interventions and increased search width provide the largest gains, while deeper search and additional semantic variants offer complementary improvements. PreviewDiff demonstrates that multimodal feedback is most useful not only as a final verifier, but as an active controller inside the denoising process.
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All authors Vighnesh Subramaniam, Boris Katz, Brian Cheung, Chun-Liang Li, Tomas Pfister, Yale Song

Optics

Mode-selective acousto-electric modulation of phonons in a silicon photonic platform

Acousto-electric (AE) interactions enable electrical control of acoustic propagation through piezoelectric media. Bringing AE control onto integrated photonic platforms provides a powerful on-chip control mechanism to reconfigure both the acoustic propagation through piezoelectric media. Bringing AE control onto integrated photonic platforms provides a powerful on-chip control mechanism to reconfigure both the acoustic delay line response and the effective photon-phonon interaction by electrically tuning the phonon propagation. Here we report a mode-selective AE modulation effect in a scalable aluminum nitride on silicon-on-insulator (AlN-on-SOI) platform. An applied DC field is seen to modulate the phonon dissipation via changes in carrier concentration in a mode-selective fashion, producing up to 20 dB forward transmission suppression of non-fundamental modes within an acoustic delay line while maintaining the fundamental Rayleigh mode, a phenomenon not captured by conventional AE treatments. To probe these dynamics, we integrate an optical waveguide along the acoustic delay line, providing a broadband, non-destructive interface between the acoustic and optical domains. Leveraging both this optical interface and the underlying mode selectivity, we demonstrate proof-of-concept multi-domain transduction and Rayleigh-mode filtering on this hybrid platform, outlining a scalable path toward electrically reconfigurable mode engineering and microwave-photonic functionality.
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All authors Ruoyu Yuan, Yishu Zhou, Matthew J. Storey, Ryan O. Behunin, Haotian Cheng, Betul Sen, Andrew L. Starbuck, Douglas C. Trotter, Andrew L. Leenheer, Matt Eichenfield, Nils T. Otterstrom, Peter T. Rakich

Chemical Physics

A partially linearized mapping approach to surface hopping (MASH-PLDM) for nonadiabatic dynamics and nonlinear spectroscopy

We derive a partially linearized version of the mapping approach to surface hopping (MASH) that provides a new method for simulating nonadiabatic dynamics in molecular systems. As in the original MASH formalism, trajectories travel on adiabatic surfaces with hops determined by the dynamics of a spin vector on the Bloch sphere. However, because the new approach is based on the partially linearized density matrix (PLDM), it has two spin vectors, which may be in the same or different hemispheres of the Bloch sphere. The former scenario describes an electronic population moving on a single adiabatic surface, whereas the latter describes a coherence moving on the average surface. We show that this new method, called MASH-PLDM, leads to improved results over the original MASH dynamics for a variety of scattering problems and spin-boson models, especially in cases where coherences play an important role. A further benefit of the new methodology is that it can treat multi-time correlation functions such as those required for nonlinear spectroscopy. We demonstrate this capability with a proof-of-principle simulation of time-resolved pump-probe spectroscopy.
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Networking

People effects on IoT indoor wireless channel characterization

Wireless communication under 1 GHz is suitable for Internet of Things (IoT) applications due to larger coverage capability with less power consumption. Bearing in mind that people and elements contained in the environment can cause variations in the channel, this paper aims to evaluate the effect of the presence of people on a 900-MHz indoor narrowband wireless channel, as we characterize the small-scale phenomena. With the increase in the number of people, a greater variation in the communication channel was noticed, which is reflected in the parameters of the probability distributions used in the characterization of the random part of the signal. In addition, second-order statistics were used to analyze the data and an adherence test was applied to confirm the behavior of the signal in relation to the distributions.
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All authors Millena Michely de Medeiros Campos, Mateus de Oliveira e Mattos, Rafael da Silva Macedo, Alvaro Augusto Machado de Medeiros, Wellerson Viana de Oliveira, Vicente Angelo de Sousa Junior

Probability

A two-scale approach for sampling local free energy minimisers

When a free energy admits several local minimisers, the associated mean-field particle system exhibits a metastable behavior, undergoing random transitions between these minimisers. However, when the number of particles is large, these transitions are rare events and typically occur at a time-scale which is out of reach for simulations. In this work, we introduce a system of particles coupled with a slow macroscopic external variable which approximately follows a Langevin dynamics associated to a coarse-grained free energy. The empirical distribution of the particle system thus samples all local minimisers of the initial free energy, with transition times which are now independent from the number of particles. The construction is inspired by a theoretical tool: the two-scale approach for proving log-Sobolev inequalities for Gibbs measures.
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Computation and Language

Concept Direction Reliability Across Languages with Different Tokenizer Fertility

Extracted sentiment directions can vary across samples even when downstream sentiment classification remains accurate. To evaluate direction reproducibility, we measure split-half agreement in English, Hausa, and Yoruba representations across four language models using both native and translated texts. We identify layers selected for agreement using ten topics and evaluate direction agreement across separate groups of fifteen topics. Using the final token, split-half agreement ranges from 0.737 to 0.870 for English, 0.589 to 0.762 for Hausa, and 0.101 to 0.399 for Yoruba, maintaining this language rank order across all 77 complete model comparisons. Classifiers trained on these same layers consistently predict sentiment above chance, demonstrating that predictive accuracy does not imply directional consistency. Furthermore, averaging token representations yields less consistent agreement, and high agreement can partially reflect sentence length. Ultimately, our findings highlight the need to measure vector direction reproducibility independently of classification performance, though they do not establish that tokenizer fertility which is the average number of tokens per whitespace separated word causes cross-lingual differences.
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All authors Muhammad Abdullahi Said, Abass Oguntade, Elisha Komolafe, Babangida Sani, Fatima Muhammad Adam, Muhammad Sammani Sani